Hello. I'm Ellen Wartella. Welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Walid Afifi, Professor of Communication at the University of California Santa Barbara, whose body of work spans more than 70 articles and who has been instrumental in developing the theory of motivated information management. He was elected as a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2021 and is currently serving as President of the National Communication Association. Today, we’ll hear more about his career in conversation with Megan Dillow, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at West Virginia University. Here's Megan.
Welcome to the International Communication Association's Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast. This is Megan Dillow of West Virginia University. And today I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to speak with Walid Afifi. Hi, Walid. I'd like to start by asking you to tell our listeners a bit about your background.
Shortly after I was born, there was a civil war that started. So a lot of my youth was spent in Civil War Beirut. My dad was a physician, and my mom was a nurse and that's where they met. My mom was from Montana. My dad escaped the Nakba [a mass exodus of Palestine’s Arab population, starting in 1948]. So he's Palestinian, and they met actually at the American University of Beirut. Long story there. But we would come back to United States for sabbaticals. Ultimately, when I was 14, we moved to Iowa City. Two years of high school there. We ended up staying there because the Civil War didn't really end until about eight years later. I did my undergrad at University of Iowa, did my grad school at University of Arizona, both MA and PhD.
So how did you come into the field?
I became an undergrad major, my junior year at Iowa. Culturally, unless, there's an important reason to leave family after high school, the expectation is that you stay with family. Since University of Iowa was in Iowa City, that was the natural next step for me. Tried a bunch of things. Tried pre-med because of my dad. Tried pre-business - I think there was some youthful rebellion. I really didn't want to be a physician, partly because my dad was a physician, and didn't love biology or chemistry. So ultimately, that wasn't going to work. I tried pre-business. Did that for a couple semesters again, didn't really love that. Tried journalism for a little bit. My junior year, I gave the Communication Studies Department a shot. I had two classes. One was by Michael Calvin McGee, who was a major rhetorician, a critical cultural theorist. That was my first class in communication, and so the fact that I ended up being a social scientist. It's kind of interesting given that that was my entree. And on the first day of class, it drew me in. He was talking about why a tomato was an unloved fruit and how we socially construct even things like fruits and vegetables. That same semester I took a class that would involve the deep analysis of the messaging and episodes of Star Trek. After that I passed through Randy Hirokawa’s class on small groups and Anita Vangelisti’s class on interpersonal communication. Loved those classes, kept there and ended up doing an honors thesis with John Lyne. He was also a philosopher of science and a rhetorician. That was a really amazing mentorship experience, because he was able to fit in really enjoyable conversations, both about the project, but more broadly about life. And I did some research with Mara Adelman. Sam Becker and Bruce Gronbeck were also around and took part in my honors thesis. So I had a great set of scholars around me at University of Iowa.
John Lyne at the University of Iowa, directed your honors work as an undergraduate. What were you looking at?
I was coming in from Beirut, and seeing the difference in media coverage in the Middle East, and here. Since we came to the United States often, I would see it, but in 1986, ‘87, there was the First Intifada, Palestinian Intifada, which is an uprising. I was struck by the way it was being covered by the media. So my honors thesis was media coverage of the Palestinian Intifada on major networks. It got me exposed to amazing literatures, but also content analysis, and finding out how to get access to hundreds of hours of news coverage and coding it. It was a pretty involved project for an undergrad thesis, but I really enjoyed it.
I'm still curious why you chose communication as your field.
I was not sure whether I wanted to do media or interpersonal because I loved Anita’s class on interpersonal. I loved Randy Hirokawa’s class in small group. I was really intrigued by my thesis. I applied pretty broadly to departments that have strengths in the media and strengths in interpersonal and sometimes strengths in both. I ended up landing at Arizona. They had strengths in both, but I pretty quickly got attracted to Judee Burgoon’s work. Specifically, she taught interpersonal communication, my first semester there. Uncertainty reduction theory was one of my first theories that she covered. And I find myself really attracted to the ideas that were in uncertainty reduction theory. It didn't hurt that Dale Brashers was in my same class. He was in my graduate cohort, and he had been in the field a couple of years longer. And so he was really more advanced in his thinking about uncertainty management theory. He was my officemate, and he was working on uncertainty management, what ultimately will become uncertainty management theory. And so we'd have these really interesting conversations around uncertainty and they kept coming back in various ways. I was finding myself more and more intrigued by interpersonal questions that I hadn't quite answered yet or not even thought through yet at all. That’s where I ended up really interested in interpersonal generally and uncertainty specifically. I was really fortunate to be surrounded in grad school by incredible grad students, like Dale Brashers, Laura Guerrero were in my cohort. Krystyna Aune, my first two weeks at Arizona, was doing her dissertation, which involved emotion, expression versus experience. And she brought couples into the lab, and I would have them engage in a conflict, and then watch their own video of the conflict separately with a research assistant with each and code like, stop it when you experience that emotion. Now rate it on how much you experience this emotion, how much you express this emotion, and there's lots of coding. And so she was looking for assistants. And I foolishly raised my hand given everything else that was going on. But I'm so thrilled, that was literally two weeks into my graduate program. At some point, I decided I actually can't do it. She’d still have the commitment to do it. She would come into the office from nine to five on weekends. She just showed her dedication to scholarship that was incredible. To witness that, to be part of that, to be close to that was incredible. Michael Burgoon served on my committee. I took the graduate theory construction seminar with him twice. He showed me a lot of what it took to prepare for the rough and tumble world of academia. So lots of incredible folks that I've been really fortunate to be around. Tammy, my wife, also introduced me what it took to do community-engaged work, and to keep being committed to continuing learning, which she does more than I think anyone that I know. More recently, some more critical folks have really been what I consider to be intellectual models or influencers. Steve Wilson, Mohan Dutta, Bernadette Calafell and folks like Kate Magsamen-Conrad, whose earlier career, an associate professor at Iowa does communicate scholarship in an incredibly effective way. The grad students that I've had the good fortune of being around, among the best of those have taught me a ton. I'm always learning from grad students. So I've just been in really good places, been lucky to be in really surrounded by really amazing people. And that's how I would reflect on my career so far.
Thank you. So in your area of research, what do you think are the big intellectual questions for communication scholars to address in the next decade? And what do you think are the big societal challenges and opportunities where communication scholarship can make a major contribution?
The contribution that I have made on one front in the field has been through work on the theory of motivated information management and related tests of it. That's the theoretical work that I spend a lot of my career working on. In the last few years, maybe seven, I've been increasingly critical of the knowledge production practices in the field. I've gone through a process of being in spaces that have really opened my eyes to the problems with how we go about advancing knowledge in the field is scandalous, because folks have forced us to open our eyes there. And I've become increasingly dissatisfied with that process. I think the challenges and opportunities ahead of us - and they're both intellectual, and societal - are to dramatically expand the reach of our research and pedagogy. We know a lot about approximately 2% of the world's population. We know a ton about US-centered college students, because our structures make it so that that's what we're encouraged to do, to get quick samples, and to publish a lot based on that. Going into the field, going into communities, taking seriously the role of working with communities, going outside of the university in which we work to access samples, takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. And some cases, a lot of funding - none of which is baked into the ways in which we're viewed for promotion and tenure. So we continue and historically have continued that model. That's what our students learn and etc, etc. So we know a ton about a tiny, tiny percent of the world's population. And that's, frankly, unacceptable. I built my career on that. So I'm certainly not above criticism, I've been a big part of that. That’s how I for a very long time taught my graduate classes and my undergraduate classes because that's what I was used to. But increasingly as we think about what good science is, sample representativeness is a critical component we're taught of good science. Yet, we also very quickly learn in grad school, but that's not anything that we pay attention to. So we learned about how you can only generalize to the characteristics of the sample, but then we see everything that's published that generalizes far beyond that, talks about message or human behaviors this way. This is how we communicate. Maybe in the discussion section, we tested in other communities, and that's about the extent of it. That's a pretty bad way of doing science, if you really take it seriously the notions of what it means to do good science and the role of sample representatives they're in. So I think we need to do a lot better at taking that seriously, and making changes structurally with our journals, with our editors, with our reviewers, with our promotion and tenure documents, with the syllabi and our classes, etc, etc. To be honest with ourselves that what we know is actually very little. Some of it may apply broadly, but we have frankly, no idea. So much of it - I can just speak at least in the interpersonal communication area - centered on an individualistic, westernized notion of what it means to relate, what identity means. When we do communicate, when we do avoid under what conditions and why, what's appropriate, what's face saving, what's not basic, all these things are really been centered in a really westernized, individualistic notion of what that is. And, frankly, it’s likely to not apply at all in more collectivistic communities. I've been doing some research on looking at some indigenous frameworks to talk about the critical aspect of connectedness across various communities as being a relational identity, being the center of well-being, and how connectedness is across various communities and with the environment is essential to relational identity, which then shapes everything else communicatively. What would it look like to ask questions that are centered around that notion of relating, for example? We don't know. Why is it that communication about race - happens in minoritized families all the time? So there's literature outside of communication, and now, thankfully, being added to communication, but very late. About how specifically, African American families and families of color talk to their kids to elevate their identity so that they can have a buffer against the racism they're going to experience. Why has that not been part of our field for decades? Well, one answer I would argue, is because so many folks in our fields have not experienced that in their lives, and they don't even think about asking that question. So if we are to diversify seriously, the field, not only in terms of knowledge produced, but the actors in the fields. It'll open our eyes to a far greater set of experiences and communication challenges that people face.
Since this podcast series is titled Architects of Communication Scholarship, what would you say you have built?
I've had a role so far in architectural projects, that others have started in various ways, and that I've taken on and in a couple of instances, adjusted. Let's say TMIM, theory of motivated information management - It's primary theoretical contribution, that was built on work done by Dale Brashers, by Austin Babrow, by several other folks, and in social psychology by a whole range of folks, Bandura being the most central. And so I took that work, and I thought about, how can we put these together in a way that existing work on uncertainty hadn't done quite in that exact way? And that was the theory of motivated information management. But that slight adjustment on work that others created, which then allowed me to see a world that was different than I originally saw. In other spaces, like the spaces I'm occupying now, to make changes in our field. Again, I entered that space because folks before me had, for decades and decades, done work to force us to see these things. And social and world events made it so that it was hard not to see it, frankly. And then I decided I really need to be an active part in elevating the work that they and others have done. So that's how I see it. It's certainly honorific to be in this series with some incredible scholars. So I'm certainly honored by the idea Architects of Communication Scholarship, but I think it's really important that'd be, in my case, framed appropriately. I think it's worth elaborating a little more the critical need to center our work in communities. I think too often we have researchers who are helicopter researchers. They come in. They fly in. They go into community. They study them, and then they leave, and the community gets no benefit really from it. What I'm trying to model - I'm trying to elevate folks who do this - is to from the start of a project, work very closely with community leaders, with community members, partly to ask what questions they have. So be honest about, let's say, I can bring my expertise in this way. And I would love to understand this question. What are the needs that you have? And how can we contribute to it and, honestly, truly learning from them? That kind of approach, I think, is something that we need to create structures that allow it. Our promotion and tenure documents don't really allow that intensive community-centered work, typically. Our journals don't even know how to process that kind of work often. Reviewers don't know what to do with it. But if we're really going to make an impact, I think we need to increasingly move away from measures of productivity that are about numbers of articles and specific outlet locations. At least for some of us, for some folks, not that everyone has to do this - but think about community impact. So if I was able to be part of changing well-being in a community, isn't that more important than having 100 people read my article and learn from it? And yet, we don't have the metrics in most departments to acknowledge that impact outside of the publication process, which again, is really important. But I think we need to broaden those kinds of metrics to better capture the range of ways in which our scholarship can impact folks.
Our talk today has certainly been informative and thought-provoking and eye-opening for me. And it is already making me reconsider some of the things that we need to do structurally and some of the things that I need to do personally and my own scholarship to move us forward in these directions that you have talked about today. They are critical. And we need to work harder on that. And I appreciate you shining a light on that. Today, in addition to allowing us to get to know you a little better. So as we close I just want to say thank you for taking the time to speak with us.
Thanks, Megan, for this conversation. It's always great to talk with you.
Architects of Communication is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producers are Ilana Arougheti and Lacie Yao. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening!
